This is a very exciting week for us. As entries for the 2015 TeenTech Awards flow in, we’re delighted to announce they will all be eligible for a brand new award to celebrate the quality of their research.

The CILIP Information Literacy Group are supporting a new TeenTech award to recognise excellence in research and information literacy. This award highlights the importance of students having highly developed research skills and the ability to critically and ethically use information to underpin their projects.

This new award will be judged across all categories in the competition. CILIP join Airbus, Atkins, Google, Cranfield University, EDF, JVC, Maplin, National Grid, OCR and Symantec, as sponsors of the industry focussed year round Award programme.

Details

All good science and technology is informed by earlier studies and previous research. One of the most famous and celebrated scientists Sir Isaac Newton famously said, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ By this he meant that his work was informed by the research of others. We expect all TeenTech projects to carry out research to better understand their area of interest, to find out how things work, to identify previous studies, understand the real market need and to find innovative solutions.

For 11-16 year olds this new award will celebrate young people showing that they can be truly information literate researchers as they explore their own ideas to make life better, simpler or easier. Winners will have demonstrated their ability to search across a range of resources, make excellent judgments about the information they have found and put it to ethical use in their project.

Dr Jane Secker, Chair of the CILIP IL Group, said: “We are really excited to be part of TeenTech and look forward to supporting participants in gaining the excellent information literacy skills necessary to generate the innovative, high-quality science and technology that the UK needs to remain at the forefront of the digital economy.”

Maggie Philbin, CEO TeenTech, said: “Search engines like Google are powerful and really valuable tools and like any tool, students need to understand the best ways to use them. They also need to see how they can use them in conjunction with other ways of finding information.”

The judges will look out for projects which draw upon high quality information to support their work. They are all professional librarians from schools, colleges and universities and information science academics.

For future entrants , The CILIP will provide guidance on how to search for and evaluate science and technology information, including a list of recommended starting places for carrying out research. They will also supply a style guide for the bibliography and a template for the search log. Research and information literacy resources to support teachers and librarians in schools will also be provided.

CILIP will offer scheduled webinars for all projects and bookable one to one research consultations for projects to help students identify suitable sources for their projects and to evaluate and use the information appropriately.

 

Schools or Libraries wishing to register interest for 2015/6 should register here: https://teentech.com/awards/awards-2016-expression-of-interest/

Contact [email protected] for more details